Yarn used: Wool Candy Fondant Merino DK in Truffle and Robin’s Egg, left over from another project; scraps of white yarn for embroidering the eyes

Needles used: US size 3/3.25 mm

Date started: November 14, 2010

Date completed: November 18, 2010

Mods/Notes:
This little owl made his first appearance melting a Dalek’s heart:

I made this owl as a gift for my cousin’s new baby–it will be a few years yet before he’s properly appreciated, but I think he’s completely adorable. Hansigurumi patterns tend to be very fiddly, with lots of grafting, but this one wasn’t bad; mostly worked in the round, mostly pretty straightforward.

The pattern is pretty skimpy on instructions for the embellishments. I ended up cutting a piece of CC yarn, folding it in half, threading the doubled end through a yarn needle, sewing a stitch and tying a square knot, doing this across several stitches and going back and tying knots in the strands between groups, then trimming everything and running a yarn needle through the yarn ends to fluff it up and separate the plies.

After the backwards legs on my Jackalope, I didn’t trust the “pick up stitches for left wing and work same as the right wing” instruction, so I worked the second wing separately, held it up to the owl to determine proper orientation, and sewed it on, to avoid the heartbreak of finding out one wing was backwards after knitting the whole thing.

I love the garter stitch texture on the wings, and the wee owly claws!

The pattern doesn’t give you required yardage! It doesn’t use much yarn, but beware if your yarn yardage is limited.

The picked up sts under the beak came out super loose and I had to duplicate stitch over them to tighten them up a bit.

I used small needles, and the owl came out pretty small. 6 inches high, maybe?